As the city settled into for its first full school week of the 2012-2013 school year, heads were turned westward toward a simmering dispute that boiled over on Sunday night. In Chicago, the teachers union announced that it was striking after negotiations broke down over terms for a new contract.

T Williams criticized both sides of the strike, blaming the conflict on a clash of personalities more than a fight over the interests of students or families:

The two groups that are most directly affected by the teachers strike are on the sidelines with no role or opportunity to play a role in helping decide the outcomes. Those two groups are the students and their parents/guardians. Far too much of what passes for educational reform is top down. Far too often approaches to resolving labor conflict is adversarial when it should be more collaborative. In Chicago the teachers have drawn their line in the sand and the Mayor and School Board have their lines in the sand and neither line seems to have been drawn with what is in the best interest of public school students. This strike will be a boom to charter school education in Chicago and elsewhere in the country depending upon the final outcome. There will be no winners.

One aspect of this strike is that [it] is also a referendum on the Randi Weingarten/Mulgrew/ Leo Casey “you have to collaborate due to climate of the times” unionism which has dug such a hole here in NYC. But we are still many years behind the impact of ed deform which began in Chicago in 1994-5. CORE/CTU which has already won some minor concessions that the UFT would have jumped at and sold to the members as the best we could get. Note how class size, which the UFT has refused to put on the table since c. 1970 is a real issue.

Buried beneath Monday’s strike news was an item out of Albany from the New York State Education Department Board of Regents meeting. The state is hoping to overhaul the two-year Global Studies Regents exam because it was too hard for students to pass. Commenters disagreed that it was too hard but seemed to agree that changes were needed.

Travis Dove, a student at CSI High School for International Studies wrote:

Sure, the information is learned over a two year period, but from my experience with the test, most of the questions were from the modern age rather than things like the Neolithic era 14892374816 years ago. Also, the thematic essay GIVES YOU TOPICS TO WRITE ABOUT, as well as the DBQ. It couldn’t be spelled out any better. Kids that spend even a week studying for it on regentsprep.org could easily get an 80+.

One of Mayor Bloomberg’s more successful initiatives has been his anti-truancy campaign to improve attendance. This year he expanded its mentorship program, a move that earned some praise from a comment, but also led to a question about whether there were more systemic solutions:

I’m glad this is working well for many students, but it seems like yet another example of how sometimes the city is 10 years behind the curve on initiatives well-known elsewhere (and, to be fair, sometimes way ahead). As I read this, all I could think was, this is the role of an advisory program, except it encompasses ALL students. And anyone versed in the best practices of middle schools for sure, and many high schools, will already know about advisory.

On Thursday evening the city released a limited set of data about its Teacher Effectiveness Pilot. The number of effective teachers increased after two years worth of observations, a trend that the Chancellor Dennis Walcott said was evidence that it was a successful way to measure teacher performance moving forward. That struck one reader as self-fulfilling on the city’s part:

Of course an administrator who has spent time observing, conferencing and coaching a teacher is likely to feel that a teacher has improved. Maybe teachers did improve, but I’m not sure the DOE report proves much of anything.